Information I would like to get from a candidate website:
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Major political platforms – what is his/her stance on issues? What are his/her top priorities?
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What policies does he plan to enact? What are his pet issues, and how would he like to reform the policies already in place?
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Federal spending plans
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Political history – where he/she has served, in what position, for how long, etc.
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Family life/history – shouldn’t play a role, but it does; won’t want to vote for a candidate who you know nothing about. Need to know about their life outside politics to get a better conceptualization of the whole person
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Success of past policies – how successful have his/her conceptualizations been in the past, is he/she able to pass legislation
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What other trustworthy figures have to say about the person – is he/she trusted? Are there people who feel this is a shady character, and for what reasons?
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Education (and potentially other mediating factors) – why is this person qualified to run the country? Why are they more qualified than this other person?
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Long-term plans for the country – where does he/she see us heading, how does he/she plan to get us there
My first impression of McCain’s website is that it is very busy. There are a lot of individual boxes containing various things, and for some reason I find it hard to read. The color scheme is very “American” – it is obviously a presidential hopeful’s website. The site does do a good job of laying out sections for most of the points I mentioned above – there is a section about his background, a section about his platform and why he would be a good president, and a section about his stance on many different issues. It focuses a lot on his military experience, which makes sense because that is one of the big areas he has experience in that the other candidates do not. There is a search function (by keyword), which is obviously useful for finding specific information, and also an easy box to enter your email in and subscribe to his newsletter. There is also a specific section for people who are “undecided” which offers more information.
One of the main things he is criticized for is his age, and so he has added a number of technological aspects to the site that appeal to a younger crowd. One of the tabs is a blog tab, where you can communicate and even compete against McCain in the NCAA brackets. There are a number of RSS feeds, ranked by popularity, and an online community called “McCain space” that allows you to join an interactive community and create your own website in support of McCain. All this is kept separate from the real site, however.
I comapared this site with Hillary Clintons. My first impression was that hers seemed less professional for some reason. Something about the color scheme – it was a little more pastel and just didn’t convey the same sense of presidency that McCain’s did. She does utilize technology more. She has links to all the top fan sites, and a section at the bottom that links to other communities like facebook and myspace and flickr.
Websites are obviously biased to include the good and exclude the bad. Therefore, they might not necessarily be the best tool to use when making electoral decisions. The internet is the main source of information for the general public, but I understand why few people look at the candidate’s actual websites. They obviously will not include anything that does not fit within their platform, and people typically want to dig underneath the surface to find out some of the shady areas of what candidates are really like. Overall, I think candidate websites can be useful for linking supporters together and getting background information, but should not be used as the end-all-be-all source of information for electoral decisions.
